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Design surely had a role in shaping the computer, but far more important was the role of the computer in shaping design. This chapter studies the involvement of designers at two labs that formed the research core of the Silicon Valley environment: the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, and the Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto Research Center. At SRI Douglas Engelbart established the Augmentation Research Center where, in a hitherto undisclosed collaboration with Robert Propst of the Herman Miller furniture company, he developed a set of tools intended to enable geographically dispersed teams to collaborate across time and space. It follows the fledgling design community to Xerox PARC, where it contributed to the development of the first computer workstation, and concludes by studying its role in the first of the market-oriented Silicon Valley technology startups.

During the 1980s and ’90s consultancies including IDEO, frogdesign, and Lunar Design grew rapidly and had begun to turn the San Francisco Bay Area from a negligible presence in the design world into its global epicenter. Nourished by contracts from newly-established tech companies they extended their reach, formalized their methodologies, and ventured into a growing number of industries and disciplines. “Game Design” grew out of the anarchic culture of Atari; “Multimedia Design” took shape at Apple; and “Interaction Design” emerged out of the forced cohabitation of software engineers, computer scientists, graphic artists, and a growing coterie of people trained in the cognitive and behavioral sciences. This chapter examines the specific nature of design practice as it evolved to meet the challenges not just of new products, but whole new product categories.

This chapter considers the forms subalterns assume under the conditions of advanced technology. As servers, demons, or other virtual creatures, they work without being seen or ever taking a break. By means of a comparative analysis of early computing systems, the mainframes, and the first machines from the age of personal computers, the discussion focuses on the conceptual and historical transfer from servant to server. The analysis is based on fieldwork conducted in California in the 1970s, when researchers at the legendary Xerox PARC center took a closer look at the conditions of formation of electronic services. What defines the communicative structure of the Internet was a specific informational architecture, the so-called client-server principle, developed in Silicon Valley after 1973.

Chapter 16 discusses the history of the computer. Important events include IBM bringing out the personal computer, and Xerox PARC inventing the graphical user interface. Paul Allen and Bill Gates left Harvard in 1975 to set up a computer laboratory. A year later Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak set up Apple, followed soon by Dan Bricklin inventing the electronic spreadsheet. At the start of the 1980s Gates leased the MS-DOS operating system to IBM. Prior to all this, in 1969 the Advanced Research Product Agency set up ARPANET, the predecessor of the Internet. Other topics covered in this chapter include the birth of electronic mail, uses and abuses of the Internet, security and coding, and the Minitel in France. The last part of the chapter looks at the Soviet Union and the InterNyet.